We all remember our first cars.  In memory they take on an almost sacred role in our personal mythologies.  They are the relics of important milestones, from first loves to formative road trips, summoning to mind the sights, sounds, and even smells of past lives and selves. 

While these vehicles live on in memory, their physical remains usually end up unceremoniously dumped in junkyards, their broken chassis bearing little trace of their once legendary significance.  Some components might be pilfered for the living, like transplanted organs.  Metal parts are sifted by magnets, with valuable materials making their way to foundries to be recast, while plastic and leather parts are destined for landfills. 

Against these indignities, Dan Dowd brings a gentle, almost priestly reverence to the earthly remains of the cars he has driven.  A lifelong automobile enthusiast, who worked at a SAAB dealership in college and has exclusively driven the Swedish brand since 1991, Dowd recites with incantatory wonder the mileage attained by each of his beloved SAABs.

Coming of age as queer man, Dowd recalls that the unique, stylish visual identity of the SAAB echoed his own self-conception as someone who was “not part of the masses.”  The exhibition’s title, “By Your Side,” refers both to the companionship offered by the cars themselves and the experience of riding in them alongside friends and partners.  In an era in which public spaces could be unkind or downright dangerous for queer folks to be themselves, vehicles served as portable safe spaces, at the threshold between public and private. 

By bringing pieces from the interior of his vehicles into the gallery, Dowd opens up this world, and indeed his own inner self.  Befitting this intimacy, Dowd’s sculptural interventions are subtle, delicate, even organic.  The eclectic colors and fabrics he introduces into the SAAB side panels are, for the most part, reflections of the interior and exterior colors of the classic SAAB 900s he cherishes.  However unorthodox Dowd’s inspirations and materials, together these panels suggest one of Western art’s most traditional forms, the polyptych, or multi-paneled altarpiece.

It is only fitting, then, that the central work in this exhibition is a scene of (auto)bodily resurrection.  The film records the crushing of a car at a scrapyard, playing it backwards and upside-down in black and white.  These inversions conjure an unexpected, spiritual quality.  The forklift that speared the vehicle in reality now gently probes its undercarriage, as if delicately embalming it according to some ancient funereal rite.  In lieu of the jarring, grinding sounds of crunching metal, this resurrection is blessedly silent.  Indeed, the car almost floats at times, tenderly hovering as if preparing to ascend to some ethereal plane.  Even in destruction or obsolescence, it seems, there is a promise of renewal down the road.